Considering the diverse makeup of the GTA, it’s not surprising that when it comes to curry there are dozens to choose from. Curry, typically characterized by a thick sauce simmered with chilies and warm spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric and cardamom, evolved from India and has been adapted in dishes around the globe. There are lemongrass-scented curries in Thailand, scorching scotch-bonnet curries of the Caribbean nations and the sweet coconut curry soups of Singapore, to name a few.

Suresh Doss, suburban foodie and editor of Foodism magazine’s Toronto edition, took me on a two-day tour of the many restaurants that serve curries across the Greater Toronto Area. Here’s a taste of what we found.

The panel was unanimous on this year’s best addition to the city. The thing is, you probably missed it.

For two weeks in June, during Toronto’s Luminato festival, the control centre of the decommissioned Hearn Generating Station transformed into Le Pavillon, a 1950s-style French bistro. Conceived by Frédéric Morin of Joe Beef and Honest Weight’s John Bil, the pop-up hosted an array of impressive guest chefs, including Daniel Boulud. It was the hottest reservation in town while it lasted, and the only debate for the panel was whether they preferred the atmosphere or the menu (a highlight: poulet en vessie, chicken poached with truffles inside a pig bladder).

“As a global event organizer, you look at the heat map of where foodies are congregating in North America,” and that’s Toronto, says Suresh Doss, Toronto food truck advocate and event organizer in his own right (Doss, who also brought the Zagat guide to Toronto, has mounted festivals dedicated to ramen and, most recently, pinxtos in Toronto, aside from his regular food truck rallies.) “When everyone’s talking about Toronto right now, what they’re thinking is that Toronto has evolved into an amazing culinary city in the past three to four years.”

It’s an evolution, Doss notes, that already has a boldfaced tinge to it — Toronto’s celebrity chef quotient is rising, as Jamie Oliver has recently announced plans for a restaurant in the city, with Ivan Reitman building a 280-seater downtown and David Chang’s Momofuku empire already entrenched in the city’s culinary identity.

“There’s a lot of interesting things going on in here … it’s not just sheer number of restaurants,” he says. “There isn’t a city that is showing a growth spurt quite like Toronto’s.”

So for a city with a culinary identity that has, until recently, been obscure at best, Taste of Toronto is at the very least a serious vote of confidence.

"Judges' Comments: Suresh's crab curry represents not only his family's physical and emotional journey, but manages to whisk its cooks to another place ruled by sun and spice. This is a dish that truly transports you. With a passion for food that began at the markets of Colombo, Suresh, now a Torontonian, relies on heirloom recipes and family to connect him to his Sri Lankan roots. This is his pilgrimage to revisit his home and discover its food all over again.

Suresh is headed to southern Sri Lanka where he will taste his way through the array of citrus and cinnamon laced curries, as well as the country's best sweets."

On Saturday, the Globe and Mail ran a profile of Suresh Doss, the 34-year-old computer systems engineer and publisher of Spotlight Toronto who’s behind Food Truck Eats. Doss’s tireless energy for the cause has some vendors suggesting he may be some kind of god, or at least, in a memorable phrase, “part elephant.” Below, five things we learned about the front lines of Toronto’s street food scene.

Earlier this year, American mega-blog Eater stretched its cyber-tentacles northward to take on the Toronto dining scene. NowU.S. resto-rating site Zagat, which was acquired by Google in 2011, has followed suit. Zagat Toronto kicked off its inaugural week with a batch of foodie roundups penned by Spotlight Toronto publisher and Toronto food truck champion Suresh Doss, who has signed on as the site’s house food writer and general culinary expert. The content is so far limited to brick-and-mortar restaurants; however, given Doss’s resume, it’s probably safe to assume the city’s roaming restaurants will get their share of attention.

Last spring, on an Easter weekend trip to Miami to research the area’s thriving food truck scene, Suresh Doss had a revelation. Mr. Doss, a 34-year-old computer systems engineer who runs a popular food and drink website called Spotlight Toronto, is the de facto face of street food in Toronto. He’s a born organizer. When somebody wants to start a food truck, or work through the city’s all-but-impossible street-food regulations, or even just to find a street-food seller at lunchtime, they turn to Mr. Doss, typically. He grew up surrounded by the stuff.

As a child in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he’d often buy a bowl of poori slathered with curry, or a paper cone filled with mango, pineapple and hot sauce from a street-side hawker on the way to school in the morning. He even worked as a chutney boy on the days when his mother, Bernadette, made her fermented rice and lentil dosas at fundraisers held outside one of Columbo’s Catholic cathedrals.